Field Notes: Wi-Fi to Wi-Fi routing

Tsukuba, Japan, 2004 I just arrived at my hotel. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’ve been offline for over 20 hours. Deep in the bottom of my bag lies an SMC “pocket” router about the size of two packs of smokes. I jack-in and power-up the router. I’m online. I leave my laptop on the [...]

Quick Tip: iCab for iPad/iPhone Browser

Safari iPad Annoyances No cookie management other than dump them all. No private browsing mode. No option to change the browser user agent. If you get sent to a mobile version of a site just because you are on an iPad you cannot do anything about it. No adjustable cache. No offline mode. Those are [...]

Quick Tip: iOS USB/SD Card photo/video import

Say you want to take a very long trip with just your 32GB iPad, and while traveling you would like to catch up on a lot of movies and TV shows, but your 32GB iPad can only hold about 30 hours of content. What can you do? Fortunately you can store your extra content on [...]

Quick Tip: iPhone to iPad photo/video import

I just read this was possible. (It never occurred to me to try.) Just connect up your iPhone (or possibly any other phone) as illustrated to the USB iPad Camera Connection Kit (sold separately) and voilà!, you can import. This old-school wired method is faster than using Dropbox. However I still prefer Dropbox–I find it [...]

OS/X tips for the lost, stolen, or broken

Backup, BACKUP, BACKUP!!! In all three cases your first line of defense is a good backup.  If you do not have multiple backups then you are an idiot and deserve to lose your data.  You obviously don’t need it. I use Time Machine for my local backup and BackBlaze for my off-site backup. However both [...]